


wreathed in the smoke of smoldering japonica

by lycheemoon



Series: ebony knives snaked in washed out flame [2]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pre-Canon, Assassin!Zuko, Blue Spirit Zuko (Avatar), Canon Compliant, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, bounty hunter not a bounty hunter zuko, i mean it is if you squint real hard, this one's a bit less assassin centric than the previous but still referenced
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:02:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28350588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lycheemoon/pseuds/lycheemoon
Summary: The crew is broke.They don’t have enough money, or enough supplies, or enough rum in the galley, and Zuko is their captain. Uncle says they’ll figure something out at the next port, and that he should not worry about it because he’s “fourteen” and “too young” to do so.(He has never been too young for this. If he were too young, then he wouldn’t be scarred and scared and scouring the scorched globe for a century-old legend, and his father would be telling him to come home.)At the next port, he slips into town with another face plastered upon his own and two silver swords hefted across his back, and seeks gold.or: zuko learns and relearns, trespasses earth kingdom territory, commits contrary treason through paid murder, and gains friends.
Relationships: Aang & Zuko (Avatar), Iroh & Zuko (Avatar), June & Zuko (Avatar), Suki & Zuko (Avatar), Toph Beifong & Zuko
Series: ebony knives snaked in washed out flame [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2064036
Comments: 35
Kudos: 411





	wreathed in the smoke of smoldering japonica

**Author's Note:**

> concept/fic expansion in notes.
> 
> cw: past child abuse (which is a given with zuko), undetailed decapitation/death, vaguely described dissociation. if i'm missing any triggers/tags, please let me know in the comments!

**i.**

Zuko is thirteen, with half his face wrapped in crisp white bandages and smoldering with scars that run deeper than his body can hold.

He is thirteen, and febrile with barely fought-off infection, and desperate to go to a home that isn’t a large hulking metal ship, and hurting so, so _bad._

“Prince Zuko,” Uncle says pleadingly, with the unshorn voice of someone who hasn’t lost everything, “please consider resting.”

(Uncle was never there. He just kept looking away and closing his eyes and vanishing as he burned and burned and burned, and now he’s back because he got burned too bad, but he was never _there_ ; he says that he loves him, but what did he ever _do?)_

“I’m not resting until I find the Avatar,” Zuko snaps, mustering what aggravation he can from his fever-addled body.

He stands at the base of jagged cliff walls, dusty rocks nudging into his toes and crawling vines a dripping flower chandelier around him. It’s relatively sheer, but even through his depthless and blurry vision, he can see the rough sandstone footholds and sweeping ledges jutting out of its otherwise featureless face, ancient cracks meandering along veins of sprouting green weeds.

In effect, it’ll make a perfectly good scaling point.

Uncle stands behind him, and if he looked, he’d see the equally-sheer look of rocky devastation scrawled across the older man’s face.

He doesn’t look. He rolls his shoulders, squinting upward with one aching red eye and a coil of rope slung across his shoulders, and starts to climb.

He doesn’t wait for Uncle, because Uncle never waited for him.

(Iroh watches his nephew scale the cliffside and perch on crumbling ledges, rubbing his unbandaged eye, and continue up with practiced ease — three to four, three to four.

Zuko is not wrong — he doesn’t even know when these peculiar skills emerged, let alone from where. He was never there until now, and he swears to himself he will never make that mistake again.

But Zuko does not wait, and he spends three days traversing the long way to the top.)

**ii.**

When the bandages come off, the left half of his face is covered in reddish-purple scarring that drips down his cheek like a waxen candle, sealing half of his eye shut and twisting his features in a permanent scowl (— not that he has any reason to wear any other expression).

When the bandages come off, his left eye is blurry and drained of color, catching nothing beyond shadows and light and flaring fire, and his left ear can’t hear a thing beyond cheering faceless crowds and an incessant ringing keen.

(“Sixty-five meters?” he tries to Uncle, in the safety of the looming shadowed tower.

Uncle looks so, so sad, and he cannot help but feel the disappointment radiating off of him reflect back on himself. “It’s fifty-one, Prince Zuko.”

Father would be so disappointed, too.)

He can’t sleep at night, because his dreams are filled with fire and blistering raw wounds crawling across his shamefully shaven head, and he wants to leave, but he can’t get out of his metal-enclosed room without sending clanging reverberations across the metal-lined decks and crashing into dark metal-plated walls.

Everything is gone, and he never thought it’d hurt this much.

\---

Zuko cannot firebend.

He discovers this three moons after his father sends him away to wash himself of the shame he’s been painted in his whole life, and this revelation does nothing but continue swirling its layered coat thicker and thicker on his skin.

He sits in front of candles and flinches at every half flicker until Uncle extinguishes them and holds his arms out — an offer, a guide; something that was never there when he wanted it.

(He never lets them hold him, because hugs are for weak, sentimental fools.)

The dao looped with Azula’s braids are dull with disuse in their dusty sheath, shoved anywhere that isn’t propped in his narrowed half-vision. He won’t let himself touch them, because he knows he’s imbalanced and impaired and he doesn’t want to rip the last thing he’s ever cared about away from him — not the same way that everything else already has been.

Uncle brings them to him anyway.

“Why were you digging through my belongings?” Zuko snaps when Uncle appears on deck, offering him a glazed wood sheath of balanced swords.

Uncle meets his gaze, unflinching of his fire. “If you intend to capture the Avatar, you must be prepared, nephew.”

(Zuko _knows_ what his uncle is doing — he’s trying to find something that makes him happy, and proposing it in guise, even though he doesn’t need to be happy. He needs to capture the Avatar, and then he can go home.)

Regardless, he begrudgingly swipes his swords from the old man, and storms away to the farthest end of the fifty-one meter deck. He pulls the blades from their encasing, inspects their gleaming edges with one working eye, and lunges into a stumbling kata he hasn’t executed for months.

(When he goes back to his room, he shuts the door, unwraps the hilts, and rewraps them properly.)

\---

He learns.

It takes too long, and it still doesn’t feel right, but he learns to pretend both of his ears work; to force some kind of light into his milky-white eye; to rebalance his swords, and to rebalance his feet.

He learns how to get out of his metal-enclosed room without sending clanging reverberations across the metal-lined decks and crashing into dark metal-plated walls, and which shadowed alcoves allow him to vanish on a fifty-one meter ship from the constant staring the crew members won’t stop subjecting him to, and he learns how to scramble up the foremast in half a minute without using the stupid ladder. He learns how to braid his own rope coils and tie five and seven different chokingly-tight knots and how to read the shower of stars he used to sleep beneath, and now sails beneath. He learns how to ration cups of barley-rice and to care for unruly hordes of komodo-rhinos and how to repair intricate ship engines with grease covered fingers and a half-rusted wrench.

(And how to properly gamble money and not people, and how to outdrink weathered sailors twice his age to establish dominance, and how to swear.

Most certainly, how to swear.)

**iii.**

The crew is broke.

They don’t have enough money, or enough supplies, or enough rum in the galley, and Zuko is their captain. Uncle says they’ll figure something out at the next port, and that he should not worry about it because he’s “fourteen” and “too young” to do so.

(He has never been too young for this. If he were too young, then he wouldn’t be scarred and scared and scouring the scorched globe for a century-old legend, and his father would be telling him to come home.)

At the next port, above rippling moonlit water and below dark starlight skies, he cradles a grinning blue mask his mother used to love.

_(“The Dark Water Spirit,”_ she’d said, caressing the painted wood in her palms; a reverent tone to her voice that she does not speak of towards Father.)

He slips into town with another face plastered upon his own and two silver swords hefted across his back, and seeks gold.

\---

Zuko finds himself entering a bustling yellow-cast tavern rimming with an assortment of rowdy customers in his hunt.

All people of whom are dressed in some bewildering combination of cross-national colors, from garish reds and draping yellows to downright solid black _(no allegiance, no fealty)_ , a jewelry stand of studded piercings and thick-ringed chokers. The sudden blubber of plunging noise whitens in his ear, twisting painfully; he cringes at its overwhelming presence in the face of spilled alcohol. A few patrons near the wind-swept entrance turn their gazes to sneer at his mask, and he finds himself glaring back in spite of their inability to see his vicious gold-eyed stare.

He threads relatively unobtrusively past brawls of drunken ruffians, making his way to the counter where an unimpressed bartender swipes violently at their splattered wood surface.

She raises an eyebrow at him — probably at his mask, which has already begun to feel uncomfortably suffocating. “Ugly mask you’ve got there,” she remarks snippily, confirming her point of focus as she wrings the towel out.

“Ugly face you’ve got there,” Zuko retorts, unable to think of anything more scathing.

She lets out a sharp, ringing laugh, clearly finding it more inoffensive than he’d hoped it’d be. Zuko scowls, knowing she can’t see _his_ ugly face. “Well, what do you want, shortass?” Asshole Bartender demands.

(Zuko _refuses_ to be offended by the term ‘shortass’, because he’s not short, he’s _not._ )

He hesitates, not entirely sure how to word his intentions. _What do people say when they offer up their murderous assets?_

(Hisaya would probably say some kind of bullshit along the lines of “Give me gold and I’ll kill your mortal enemies for you”.)

With a burst of hasty improvisation, he blurts out, “Is there anyone you need dead?”

Asshole Bartender’s hands halt their disintegration of the rum-splattered rag. “Perhaps,” she says slowly, voice taking on a languid drawl. She puts the towel down, and leans over the counter. “Perhaps there is.”

\---

June’s eyes narrow at the grey-clad meter-and-a-half tall figure standing between her and her trussed up target.

“Get out of my way,” she says evenly, refusing to be unnerved by the empty stare behind the blue theatre mask, because that’s a fucking _theatre mask._ “Go find your own criminal.”

The figure lets out an indignant huff. “Fight me,” they offer, “and I’ll let you take him.”

June glowers through the sheet of thick hair falling over her left eye. “I don’t need your _permission_ to take a prisoner,” she grits out at the apparent _child_ , if their scratchy voice and corresponding lack of height was any indication of age.

They surge into a blur of motion, and she blinks at the sudden appearance of two swords crossed at the bound earthbender’s throat. “ _Fight me_ ,” they repeat, disturbingly distorted young voice dropping dangerously.

Well, if the little punk wants a fight — who’s she to deny?

\---

The bounty hunter — _June_ , his mind supplies helpfully — vaults off her shirshu and assaults Zuko with a barrage of knives and fists.

Zuko has lived half his life around Mai and Ty Lee.

“Are we using weapons or not?” he asks shortly after swiping aside the blades with his own, ducking beneath her fist and stumbling back at its follow up. (He still has some semblance of honor left, even if Father stripped him of it.) He flicks his swords in a mirroring semicircle and slides the right along a third knife dancing awfully close to his ribs, then jabs its hilt at her wrist.

Somehow, her expression manages to turn even more foul. “I don’t care,” she snaps, swinging left and gripping his arm in a startlingly strong grasp.

He huffs another breath, sweeps his legs in a half arc leading into an overbalanced flip, and effectively wrenches his limbs back. “I was just offering,” he grumbles, steadying his feet. “In case you needed it to be fair in order to collect your bounty.”

(He’s only half-aware of the alarmed squeak _his_ hostage lets out.)

June procures a dagger and flips it to her left hand, feinting a dipping cut at his thigh. “Nothing’s _fair_ in this world, punk,” she informs him in an eerily Azula-like manner.

(Like he doesn’t already know that.)

Suddenly, he’s so fucking _tired_ , because he never asked to be fourteen and fighting a testy woman in the dead of the night over a bounty so he could supply for his infinitely older crew. He crouches, flattens the inner edge of his foot into the grainy uneven ground, and kicks a faceful of sand at her eyes.

“Yield,” he orders, single dao angled against the artery in her throat.

June swallows, visibly.

He presses closer. “Yield, or I’ll —”

In hindsight, it turns out that tying up an earthbender surrounded by fields of sand was not the most effective method of restraint.

\---

Turns out Little Sword Punk has some sharp, violent, and decidedly _deadly_ reflexes that she does not want to be on the short end of.

The meter-and-a-half tall figure tilts their head down at the severed head rolling to a stop across the sea washed shore, and lets out an incredibly sulky sigh. “I hope that bartender takes heads,” they finally say, and June doesn’t attack them through her sand-encrusted eyelashes and now broken arm, because she’s not a _loser_.

“So,” she starts, thrown across the back end of Nyla’s saddle and knotted in the same ropes her intended-bounty had been tied in half an hour prior. “Blue-mask.”

“It’s the _Dark Water Spirit_ ,” they emphasize irritably, seemingly offended and further indicating their lack of age. “And don’t get started on the indignity and discomfort. I had to hitch a ride on the bottom of this thing to get here.”

(Zuko had _known_ what kind of experience that would be — he’s done that particular not-a-stunt on at least half of the komodo-rhinos from his own ship, _and_ they’d smelled twice as bad — but it was an agonizingly long ride, and a lot scratchier, and definitely not high on his list of preferable-modes-of-transport.)

June shrugs the best she can, being flung across her closest companion’s back like a corpse, and ignores the latter message (because what the _fuck_ ). “The Blue Spirit seems more appropriate. Since you’re clearly a theatre kid.”

The Blue-Not-Blue Spirit actually twists from the front of the saddle to stare her down with an inhuman grin inexpressibly radiating of pure petulance. “I am _not_ a theatre kid!” they shoot back, wearing a theatre mask — you know, like a theatre kid.

\---

(Asshole Bartender does not ask about her secondary hire; rather, she accepts and inspects the decapitated head’s gaping features with a satisfied expression, and pays in spilling bags of silver.

Said secondary hire is indignantly raging in the stables of the bar as her bounty is collected by a masked, sword-wielding, meter-and-a-half-tall theatre kid.)

\---

Zuko comes back to his ship with sand sticky on his bloodied hands, and vanishes in its echoing halls as he deposits the riches into their empty funds.

**iv.**

Sometimes, when the crew can’t afford to buy the supplies they need at unwelcoming Earth Kingdom ports, Zuko shrouds himself in the shadowed blues and greys of the night, crosses his blades, dons a familiar mask, and evanesces into scraggly streets in pursuit of a cheap bounty at worst; a well-paying hirer at best.

(“Fatalize Commander Chen-Wei from ashmakers’ prying tongues,” they say, and he does.

“Free the 42nd battalion from the Fire Nation’s clutches,” they say, and he does.

“Kill Admiral Hazumi and halt his siege to our towns,” they say, and he does.

It isn’t that hard after he relearns the trick of detaching himself from his body and never diving back after the drifting corpse in the pool of black ink. Zuko watches his blades slice through the throats of his own people, and watches his hands slide deadly poisons into Earth prisoners’ meals, and watches his mother’s mask become a sign to the peasants — and yet, it is never him. It’s not him, and he doesn’t know who it is, but it’s not him.

Sometimes, a part of him that pulses a beat in shards of broken glass worries about how easy it is; but this is, after all, nothing more than contrary treason, and he’s done this for too long to care.)

He returns at the glimmer of dawn and doesn’t say a word of the treasonous actions he undertakes those nights, even as gleaming eyes simmering with disdain and curiosity follow him back to his hollowed metal quarters.

**v.**

Uncle says they’ve only been unaligned with _(defects of)_ the Fire Nation for a few months as they traverse dusty Earth plains, that “we will be okay, Prince Zuko”, and that “it will not be this way forever”.

(Zuko doesn’t say that he’s only been a defect of the Fire Nation for a few years, because it’s not treachery; solely, the incongruous actions he has to undertake, albeit in a roundabout manner. It’s not like he has a choice, having been slipped a target on his back that he can’t peel off.)

Now, they are in Ba Sing Se, the city that Uncle tried so hard to conquer all those years ago, and it is not just the Blue Spirit who is a traitor.

He doesn’t know how to navigate through cobbled streets labeled in unfamiliar Earth dialects, only through uneven moon-tiled rooftops painted in unfamiliar constellations. He wears the mask of a wanted vigilante and roams the city’s sweeping awnings, never looking for anything but solace from bustling spiceless vendors and the scent of wafting jasmine tea; somehow, he finds himself crossing his dao at the throats of the men who hunt purses and children that belong to these ruptured stone pavements, and it simultaneously feels like returning to a place of comfort and unknowing.

_(My name is Lee; I’m a refugee, a non-bender. I use swords sometimes, and serve tea other times._

He hates that sometimes, he wishes it were true.)

**vi.**

Toph likes talking to him, and he doesn’t really know why, but he supposes it’s nice that someone in the temple (other than Aang) is willing to tolerate him.

She makes him give her piggyback rides because he burned her feet, and makes snarky remarks about noble life because he’s been there too, and flings herself across him because the fire’s too far, and he really does not know what to do about it.

But tonight, there’s no fire — just the stars and wind and the two of them, because _fuck_ he’s tired and doesn’t want to argue with the earthbender’s presence.

“What’re you doing out here?” she asks bluntly, inviting herself to flop beside him.

Zuko shrugs. “I dunno, what are you doing out here?”

Toph falls silent, so he doesn’t offer an answer, and turns his gaze back to the granular trickle of constellations above the colorless dark water sky. They look an awful lot like a mirror of sand freckled across streaks of drizzled ruby blood.

“Do you ever miss home?” she asks eventually, hardly sounding like the brash, confident girl who stomps steepled stone and radiates a constant compulse for attention.

He swallows. Home hasn’t been home for a long, long time.

He doesn’t know the endless silk-strewn snaking palace corridors he and Azula used to wander as he told her about plants, and he doesn’t know the petrified haze of faces who’d graced his presence at every flameless corner. He doesn’t know the intricately emblazoned stone patterns lining flat hallways and the dozens of untouched too-thick inked scrolls rolled into their gold embossed casings and the ash-filled pond in a burnt down garden.

(Home was where Uncle was, and he was the one who put him in prison, and abandoned him and went to the desolate red halls of his childhood, and chased after the ghost of a life that wasn’t there, and _failed_ to fix it.

Now, he doesn’t even know if he has a home.)

“Maybe,” he says instead. “Why? Do you?”

Toph looks like she’s been thinking enough time for a trickle to run through hourglass runes. “I think I might miss a few things,” she confesses, head tilted away at crumbling sandstone that her milky eyes can’t see. “Like, at least I didn’t have Katara’s shit-awful cooking every night, and beating up buff dudes was pretty fun.” She pauses, and turns her head back, continuously staring past him, and with an unplaceable twinge of emotion, he realizes that she’s still twelve, and roaming the world with people she didn’t owe shit to, and leaving behind everything she’d ever known. “I don’t regret leaving my fuckheaded parents, but is it… I don’t know, weird to feel _bad?_ ”

Zuko swings his legs over the edge of the cliff ledge and looks down into a ravine he stood over three years ago, and wonders what it’d be like, even though he knows what it’s like. “I hadn’t been home for three years. A lot changed,” he admits. He forces out a laugh; it sounds dissonant in his ringing ear. “I guess I thought it’d be more, or something.” _But now I can’t go back, and I don’t know if I’ll ever see it again,_ he doesn’t say. “I was really hooked on the idea of what wasn’t ever really there, I think? And so it’s not really the same for me, leaving again, but… I think yeah, it’s okay to feel weird about it.”

(He chooses his words with a deliberation that he doesn’t normally strive for, because he knows that if he says the wrong thing, the words might hurt more than the burnt feet ever did.)

“You’re Toph,” he adds. “You didn’t owe them shit, but they were still your parents.”

(He wonders if he’s overstepped, but he gets it — maybe a bit too well, because he’s been there too.)

She makes a noncommittal sound, and silence swallows the too-thin air.

“You ever seen Gaoling’s Earth Rumble?”

Zuko startles at the question. “Actually, yeah,” he says, vaguely reminiscing of deliberately grown kumquat trees and tangy red sunsets. “Like… seven? Seven years ago.” He holds out his fingers and double checks, because Toph is blind, and Toph can’t see him counting on his fingers.

“Really?” Toph plants a hand on the ground. “What were you doing in the Earth Kingdom seven years ago?”

He thinks back to Hisaya and his petty grudges towards ugly grey-assed callouts, and isn’t sure if he should really want to divulge more information about the shit he pulled for the man. “Doing stuff someone told me to do,” he tries, praying she doesn’t question further.

Turns out that even the blind girl gives a mildly terrifying death-stare.

He sighs, resigning himself to his former mentor’s legacy. “He kind of wanted me to kill someone he didn’t like for him. I think it was some old guy called… Beixiong? Something like that?”

Toph sits up. “Beifong? No fuckin’ way, Sparky.”

“What?” _Fuck, please don’t tell me she knew him. She was like… three, right? Three — oh —_

“My grandfather got killed by the nine year old prince of the _Fire Nation?_ That’s —” She breaks off, doubling over in laughter.

Zuko stares, uncertain as to whether or not he should be apologizing for slipping a(n un)healthy dose of cicuta beneath the man’s gold threaded sheets and taking his pink jade badgerfrog bracelet.

“Sorry,” he finally offers. “I, uh… I hope it wasn’t too painful?”

_(“Make sure that insecure little bitch-faced Beifong suffers”_ echoes uncomfortably in his mind.)

Toph just wheezes more, and her echoing laughs feel a little more like home in the middle of a deserted temple of ghosts.

**vii.**

Sokka eyeballs the dual blades Zuko draws. “Do you know how to use those?” he asks doubtfully.

(“I’ve only trained one student in the art of the dual dao,” Master Piandao had said when Sokka surveyed his vast assortment of blades. “He was an exceptional case, and trained beyond the blade.”

“What do you mean, beyond the blade?” Sokka asks uneasily, because the Fire Nation was already rabid enough with an abnormal amount of terrifying murder-children.

Piandao’s expression shutters to a blank, devoid of emotion. He doesn’t answer, turning away to a specter who wasn’t there.)

Zuko smirks. “Sure I do,” he says agreeably, and proceeds to kick his ass.

**viii.**

Katara sits in the back of Appa’s saddle, feeling like her hands are covered in blood that was never drawn.

_Because you drew with it instead,_ her mind whispers, licking flames against an unfueled lamp. _Because you reached inside of him, and took control, and —_

“Why do you have so much black clothes?” Katara asks right on top of the ripples of her curling ink-pooled thoughts, fingering said black clothes. (Maybe it’s because she doesn’t want to ask the actual questions yet, like why he kept royally fucking up every chance he was given, yet he’s here now, and why he’s here now, and —)

Zuko — the one who’d chased her and her friends across the world for half a year, and left a smoldering trail of death and ashes trailing in his wake, and turned around and practically killed Aang, and had the sheer _audacity_ to reappear after one of the worst days of her life to ask to join their group; the one who managed to coax out the side of her that urged to bring the wrongdoers of the world down to their knees before her; the one who’d offered her a chance to look down at her mother’s killer and to have a chance to see and comprehend — glances back from Appa’s reins, and looks so ludicrously embarrassed that she almost laughs in spite of herself.

“I… like black?” he offers weakly, singular brow furrowing.

Katara blinks, because this is burn-down-villages, repeated-back-stabber, professional-trash-talker fire-prince _Zuko_. “You… ‘like black’,” she echoes, slowly, instead of sniping out the words she wants to say about the Fire Nation’s appalling obsession of nationalism and red.

Zuko nods vigorously, flushing. “Yeah, I like black,” he affirms, twitching the reins enough to veer them slightly left. “And I, uh, thought… maybe, someone would want to go, uhhh. Do things. In black.”

Katara… does not know what to say to that.

“Like, stealing files or espionage and shit,” Zuko rambles on stiltedly, eyes excruciatingly fixated on the head of the saddle. “In black, which is a good color. ‘Cause it’s better to execute a lot of in-nin in black, unless it’s a snowstorm, where white’s probably better, but there’s no snow here. So I brought black.”

Katara does not want to unpack that.

**ix.**

“You know, Zuko,” Aang starts at breakfast following the play, “now that I think back on it, your Blue-Spiriting thing was pretty impressive.”

Sokka chokes on the food jammed in his mouth, and Suki absentmindedly pats him on the back.

“It wasn’t exactly something new,” Zuko points out. “I’ve done that dozens of times. I mean, it was usually extermination rather than extraction, but it still follows the same philosophy of break-in and break-out."

Aang bursts into an unprovoked coughing fit.

Toph’s expression morphs into a sort of feral grin. _“Oh?”_ she says, delighted. She leans back, shoving her chopsticks unceremoniously into her rice, and angles her feet towards him.

“Yeah,” Zuko continues, still half engrossed in picking bits of scallion out of his soup. "I even got paid to do it a few times during banishment, when we needed money and shit. Do you know how much people are willing to pay for just one dead person?" He makes a face. “A few actually tried to get me to kill myself, for an unfortunately high price. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t me.”

(Sokka doesn’t mention that no one actively wishes they were Zuko.)

“Hold up,” Suki interrupts dubiously. “People pay you to murder other people?”

Zuko looks incredibly offended. “I wasn’t a _bounty hunter_ ,” he says with palpable indignance. “I just do like — _did_ — hired assassinations. Except that one time six years ago, where I was supposed to kill my father or something. I wasn’t getting paid for _that_.”

(No one laughs, and he cringes inwardly, because that was _funny_ and Sokka won’t stop telling him to get a sense of humor.)

“Six years ago?” Katara blurts out. “You mean, when you were _ten?_ ”

“Eleven,” Zuko corrects, being sixteen years old. “But, uh, obviously that didn’t happen. Because we’re here. Trying to… kill my father. That I didn’t kill six years ago. Yeah.”

Aang looks so mortified by the words spewing out of Zuko’s mouth that he almost feels bad, but what else is he supposed to _say?_

“Sorry I didn’t follow through,” Zuko tries. “It would’ve made life, uhhh. A lot easier…?”

Sokka groans. “Please stop,” he complains. “We’re not asking eleven-year-old-you to murder the Fire Lord.”

A beat of silence. “I was supposed to assassinate him the day before his coronation, actually, which would’ve been a lot easier. Except my mom killed the other Fire Lord first. I wish I’d gotten to take a look at his corpse,” Zuko adds wistfully, unaware of the horrified glances his friends shared. “Nerium was always her favorite, after all.”

\---

(“Wait,” Sokka says, jerking up and drunk out of his mind off of Fire Lord Ozai’s sake cellar. “You were the _Blue Spirit?_ ”

Zuko shrugs, half-wishing the sake was more potent. “Yeah, and?”

“Didn’t the Blue Spirit like… I don’t know, do professional murder and treason?”

Zuko squints into the vaguely blurring starless sky, and curls his fingers around the bottle. “Was it professional?” He downs half of it, scowls, and passes it back to his lightheaded friend. “I just kind of stole a lot of June’s bounties and pissed the shit out of her, except I didn’t really take prisoners.”

Sokka contemplates his response for a long moment, then shrugs as well. “Yeah, you seem like that kind of person,” he agrees.)

**x.**

It’s three days before Sozin’s Comet, the world is teetering on a spark burning down its century-old prepped fuel, and Aang is not having a good time.

He _gets_ that Fire Lord Ozai isn’t a good person — he’s not _naive_ , even if his friends are treating him that way — and he supposes he’d always known that he would have to do something by the end, but actively envisaging the idea of deliberately, consciously ending his life makes him feel sick to his stomach.

(Aang doesn’t know if it’s selfish for him to want to refuse giving up the last misty vestiges of what he believes in to stop the spark. Everything his friends keep flooding in his ears are saying that it is, but it feels so _wrong_ , a twisting nausea crawling across his body.)

He lets out a sigh, carding a hand through Momo’s short fur, and leans against the _(Fire Lord’s)_ verdana’s splintered wood stakes.

(It feels so _wrong_ to reside in the abandoned beach house of the man they plot to dethrone, even if “nobody’s lived here for ages” and that they should “stay here solely out of spite”.)

A steaming cup of tea is set in near silence next to him, and an equally silent shadow perches itself on the balcony’s frame. Aang doesn’t look at either.

Eventually, Zuko breaks the silence. “I killed my first victim when I was nine, with my swords. The blood took ages to drain.”

A bubble of frustration rises up in Aang, because he doesn’t want to hear this right now, not when the world’s on a three-day timer and he’s on the path of sacrificing a life that he doesn’t want to present to the altar. “Okay, you’ve killed before! I know, I _know_. That doesn’t mean — that doesn’t mean that I have to _kill_ the Fire Lord.” He chokes on his words and chokes on the thoughts in his head, rubbing Momo’s ears flat against the lemur’s skull.

“No,” Zuko agrees softly, “it doesn’t. If there’s another way, then… well, I support you. I just don’t think there is.”

“Doesn’t it bother you?” Aang blurts out, unable to stop himself, turning his head to face the firebender lined against lapping grey waves. “That we’re here, in your old house, planning out how to defeat your father.”

Zuko, strangely enough, just shrugs. “Not really,” he admits.

They fall silent, and Aang wonders what his friend is thinking as he grips his teacup so hard it looks like it might shatter.

“How do you do it?” Aang finally asks. “How do you just… I don’t know, target a person, and just _kill_ them?” _Because if anyone gets it, it should be him._

Zuko looks at him consideringly, for what feels like a few minutes when it’s only been a few seconds. “Hisaya always said that the paraphernalia of humanity is useless. I could never really get behind that principle, so I guess I kind of pretended I wasn’t me.”

Aang blinks, because that wasn’t exactly the response he was expecting — not that he knows what kind of response he wants to hear. He doesn’t even know who Hisaya is, and to be entirely honest, he isn’t sure if he wants to know. “What do you mean, pretending you weren’t you?”

The firebender sets his still-steaming cup down, leans back, hooks his legs on the rafters, and regards him with upside-down eyes angled slightly to Aang’s right. “I dunno. It always kind of felt like I was outwardly watching myself slit throats and other shit, like I was never actually the executioner. If that makes sense.”

For a moment, it does sound easier, even if he knows his hands would still be stained in blood afterwards.

“But I can’t do that,” Aang says. “I can’t just… pretend I’m _not me._ I’m the Avatar.” _(And I don’t want to watch myself kill someone.)_ “I’m — I’m sentencing the Fire Lord to his _death_. I don’t get to do that.”

Zuko remains hanging midair. “I guess you don’t,” he says, after the waves splash too hard and the sand blows too far. “I’m sorry.”

_You’ll figure it out,_ he doesn’t say, like everyone else already has.

He flips onto his feet soundlessly, walking across creaking wood planks that don’t creak under his own toes, reheats Aang’s too-cold tea, and vanishes into the night.

**\+ i.**

The six of them might’ve just stopped the world from burning down to ashes from its century-old prepped fuel, and yet, Suki is very, very tired.

“ _Zuko,_ ” she says, swinging herself onto the Fire Nation’s royal rooftops in the dead of the night for the fifth time this month. “We can’t _guard_ you if you’re just… What are you even doing? Just hanging out on the open roof?”

Zuko rolls his eyes, like the sixteen year old shithead he is. “I’m not going to get _assassinated_ , Suki,” he states, as if it were the most absurd notion he'd ever heard — as if it were a _law of the universe_ , and Zuko being Zuko, he might as well believe it.

(Her friend was, indeed, incapable of processing the very concept of his own demise, and considering all the odds against him and various challenges to lightning — well, she couldn’t exactly blame that mindset, because if she didn’t know better, she might’ve thought the same.)

Suki glares him down the best she can. “You do realize that you’ve had the most initial assassins _ever_ in the first month of your reign, right?”

Zuko sits up, clearly a little plastered on sleep deprivation. “Really?” he says, far too eagerly for someone who was just told that far too many people want him dead. He puts the flat of his palms on the edge of the parapet, tips his head up at the stars, and lets out a — a _content_ sigh. “Wow. I’m breaking the Fire Lord’s royal record-for-assassinations. What irony. I hope I go down in history for that.”

\---

It’s been two months since Zuko was appointed Fire Lord, and the nation’s infrastructure decayed, and the procession of half-assed peace talks began, and he’s decided it’s about time to properly reacquaint himself with the palace rooftops because they’re the sole good place in the spirits-damned Fire Nation.

He finds himself crouching in three different blind spots situated throughout the outer bulwarks, in addition to one located near his own room that would allow a well-placed knife throw to assist in catching fire to its curtains.

(He does _not_ wedge himself into the cramped sliver of the west pagoda tower, survey the rear-facing guards silhouetted against the silvery moonlight, and drunkenly contemplate around six different ways he could take out said guards and himself from that site alone.)

These flagrant assassin-accessible positions weren’t there when he was eight and learning his very existence was a curse of itself.

“Suki,” he announces the next morning, throwing himself across her lap in the dining hall and mindless to the scandalized looks its servants exchanged. “Suki, your guard has like. _Thirty_ security problems. How are the turtleducks supposed to defend themselves if the guards aren’t doing their _job?_ ”

“... _Thirty_ security problems?” Suki repeats, a little offended.

“Okay, four,” he amends. “But they’re just… there… and… and, the _turtleducks_ , Suki.” He lets out a noise of frustration, likely directed at the ministers he’d been arguing with all day yesterday, but translating into _Suki, the turtleducks aren’t safe._

Suki sighs, because no matter how incredibly stupid he acts at times, he’s still the group’s designated break-in-break-out philosopher. “We can look at them tonight,” she offers.

(In spite of herself, she’s mildly impressed by the warped contortions Zuko can flex into while explaining the four different deficiencies in her guard rotation, and mildly concerned by the detail of which he describes various methods of self-assassination.)

\---

Two months later, seventeen-year-old Fire Lord Zuko sneaks into town and returns to an overturned room with a bewildered assassin _outlined_ in the blasted chambers, because whoever designed it put so much red and not enough black.

_What a fool,_ he thinks, yanking his favorite kunai from its worn leather sheath.

… He assassinates the assassin, like the professional assassin he is.

**Author's Note:**

> wow okay so i just outlined and wrote this fic in seven days, leave me to die
> 
> assassin!zuko was a concept proposed by [@the-turtleduck-pond](https://the-turtleduck-pond.tumblr.com/tagged/assassin-zuko) on tumblr. more on that is in the previous part.
> 
> i'm not very good at characterization or dialogue, so sorry if that was really stilted and weird heh; i don't write very much, and so this is a Foreign Concept. if i ever get better, i might come back and fix this bullshit. i plan to write the fourth rather than third part next (that being, centered around actual Ninja/Assassin-ing because i don't feel like writing piandad yet), and i heavily doubt it'll be up by next week, but i can wish all i like. plotting is in the series notes. uh anyway i hope you enjoyed, and if you did, maybe consider dropping by my first part?
> 
> i'm [@jade-of-mourning](https://jade-of-mourning.tumblr.com) on tumblr, and since i'm a huge fucking loser, i drew myself [selfart](https://jade-of-mourning.tumblr.com/post/644390489818267648/its-been-ages-since-i-used-my-fingers) :>
> 
> thank you for reading, comments allow me to not wake up with debilitating anxiety every morning, thank you very much <3


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